In our previous blog we discussed the Assess Capacity section of the Optimize Capacity pillar of vROps. Today we will dig into the Reclaim section of the same pillar.
Click the Reclaim link and you'll be presented with all Datacenters, with Group By and Sort By options:
Select a Datacenter and you'll be taken into the details dashboard for that particular Datacenter. Documentation supporting this page can be found here: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vRealize-Operations-Cloud/services/user-guide/GUID-4A29FC9A-0876-41CD-9C6B-F37CA30E5757.html
At the top you'll see the selected Datacenter (and all others) with the Datacenter name, how much time it has remaining until it runs out resources (CPU, Memory, or Disk, whichever is most constrained), Cost Savings if you were to reclaim unused resources, and the Workload Optimization status of the selected Datacenter.
The next row contains two widgets, the one on the left describes how much you can save by reclaiming resources, and where you'll be reclaiming them from. In the case above I can save $1252/month by reclaiming VM resources.
The widget on the right shows you exactly how much of each resource can be reclaimed: CPU, Memory, and Disk. It also shows the percentage of the total you can reclaim, a visual reflection of how much capacity you are wasting. Note: there is a "Duration older than" filter available below this widget that allows the user to select how far back they want to look for idle or powered off VMs.
The bottom widget will list all of the VMs, the Cluster they are in, how much you can save by reclaiming the resources on that VM, and other metrics depending on what tab you've chosen. The tabs will be listed by most impactful from left to right. That is, if you can reclaim the most capacity by deleting powered off VMs, this will be shown first.
Each tab will have it's own set of actions available to the user. When selected, vROps reached out to vCenter to take these actions. For example, above you can see that we can delete the powered off VMs by selected a VM/s then clicking the DELETE VM(S) button. You can also exclude certain VMs from calculations and/or export the list to a .csv.
The user is presented with additional options when selecting the Idle VMs tab:
Here, you can see the VMs, how much you will save by reclaiming capacity, and exactly how much of each resource you will reclaim: vCPU, Memory, and Disk. The Duration indicates how long that particular VM has been idle. There are several actions available here, including powering off the VM or deleting it entirely. The Snapshots and Orphaned Disks show similar information with associated actions.
A couple final things to note:
Calculations are based on either Allocation or Demand models as indicated by the radio buttons above the bottom widget of the Assess Capacity Dashboard. Details here: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vRealize-Operations-Cloud/services/user-guide/GUID-7061320E-00F6-450D-A3DF-897E17D463D2.html
You can adjust Reclaim settings by clicking the gear icon at the top next to the title Reclaim. Options are then presented:
